Core-city climate leadership in metropolitan contractual management agreements

ABSTRACT

Metropolitan governance and planning increasingly are understood as essential in managing urban growth and fostering a sustainable and climate-friendly metropolitan development. Lately, a contractual turn can be observed in metropolitan governance, in which traditional coordination tools are supplemented by contractual management tools between governmental layers and sectors. This article analyses two cases of metropolitan contractual management agreements, one in the Oslo region and one in the Gothenburg region. The article finds that both agreements build on regional strategies and plans to commit national authorities to invest in infrastructure in these metropolitan areas. The Oslo agreement has more layers than the Gothenburg case, in trying to align national, regional and local authorities’ efforts in both land use and mobility politics. The agreements require advanced leadership competence from the core-city, curbing centre-periphery tensions in metropolitan areas and building local alliances to pressure national authorities in agreement negotiations. We argue that this requires a co-creational leadership role, which, in a multilevel governance setting, must be extended to include dimensions such as distributional balance sensitivity, delineation sensitivity and upward pressure.

KEYWORDS:

• Contractual management
• climate transition
• mobility
• regional planning
• metropolitan governance
• leadership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Finland, it is called ‘Letters of intent for land use, housing and transport (2012–2015)’, (Maankäytön, asumisen ja likenteen aiesopimukset), in Norway ‘Urban Growth Agreements’ (‘Byvekstavtaler’), in Sweden some are called ‘Urban environment agreements’ (Stadsmiljöavtal) (Smas 2017, 25).

2 http://www.citypopulation.de/en/sweden/metrogoteborg/.

3 https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/gothenburg-population.

4 ‘Urban Growth Agreement between the municipalities of Oslo, Bærum, Skedsmo, Oppegård, the county municipality of Akershus and the state, 2019-2029’, Byvekstavtale mellom Oslo kommune, Bærum kommune, Skedsmo kommune, Oppegård kommune, Akershus fylkeskommune og Staten 2019–2029.

5 https://www.vastsvenskapaketet.se/english/.

6 The regional agreements: https://www.goteborgsregionen.se/download/18.276a42981270147ed3580006332/1359469265417/Structural%20Illustration%20for%20the%20Göteborg%20Region.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

The article is based on the empirical studies in the research project ‘Governing the green shift in Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen and Cape Town’ (GreenGov), financed by the Norwegian Research Council [grant number 270668].